


superfutūrus

by quisquam



Series: obsequor [1]
Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Caesar's Legion, Gen, general legion nastiness, playing fast&loose with ulysses' timeline here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-17
Updated: 2018-06-17
Packaged: 2019-05-24 11:19:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14953691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quisquam/pseuds/quisquam
Summary: Ulysses never believed he’d survive.





	superfutūrus

**Author's Note:**

> There's a brief and fairly mild dubcon/non scene in this piece. Not particularly graphic, but perhaps worth avoiding if you find that upsetting.

Ulysses never believed he’d survive. Not really, anyway.

His survival was a strange thing, glittery and improbable, a legacy written in the blood along the highway that wound through Dry Wells. 

He remembered being fifteen, kneeling with the other men, hands tied behind his back, looking up into Vulpes Inculta’s unnatural pale eyes. He remembered being fifteen, trading the braids on his head for his life; an unarmored crimson tunic and a machete blunt from severing the heads of his cousins.

He remembered being seventeen, kneeling before a centurion, rising as a newly appointed decanus, a position bought with the capture of a doctor from New Mexico. He was twenty when he caught Vulpes’ eyes again- he’d sent one of his recruits into a camp of Sun Dogs refugees, had him beg for help in the clipped Four States patois all Legionaries had been commanded to forget. The refugees trusted the boy, a child of fourteen covered in half-scarred whip marks, never thought to check him, never worried until the guards were already poisoned and Ulysses had captured forty slaves without firing a shot.

It was a simple ruse, artless in its artifice, the sort of thing refugees on the run should have seen through, but there was something in it that made Vulpes glow with pride. “Mercury smiles upon you,” he’d said, his dead man’s eyes shining like a mirage. 

It was Vulpes who brought him to Caesar’s attention, Vulpes who maneuvered so that he could kneel for a final time and rise anointed by the Son of Mars, Caesar’s blessing upon him. “This decanus shows promise, my lord” he’d said, hand cold despite the Mojave heat, heavy on Ulysses’ shoulder as he knelt. 

“You want him?” Caesar shook his head and laughed “Fucking take him, Vulpes. I don’t give a shit.”

Vulpes took him to his tent that night, “A little gratefulness would be good, boy. I just saved your life” he’d murmured, soft and lethal in Ulysses’ ear.

He wasn’t sure if it was a sense of obligation or the pressure of Vulpes’ hand on his throat that made him do it, just remembered the look on his face in the half-light of his tent; flat and empty even as he came in bitter spurts in Ulysses’ mouth. The other frumentarii in camp ribbed him the next morning, ribald jokes that made Ulysses’ skin prickle, and he quietly vowed to never be alone with Inculta again. 

 

Frumentarii work suited him better than leadership, let him walk under the stars and sleep in the day as he had when he was young. He’d been taught to scout as a boy- his mother had seen potential in him, her strange, silent child, taught him to navigate by the stars, which plants to eat, and how to test the direction of the wind with a handful of fine, powdery sand. 

He never believed he’d survive, even as he slipped his way out of ever increasingly improbable traps. He wished he’d died as a decanus, died before he had a chance to see the Divide, wished the eyebots hadn’t rescued him, but then-- someone needed to bear witness to the destruction. 

He painted his duster with pigments a Painted Rock recruit in his old squad had showed him to make (a dangerous thing, tribal knowledge); white from bone ash, pea leaves processed with clay for blue, the scaly bugs that gathered on cactus leaves made a brilliant blood red. He would remember, even if no one else did, even if the courier who carried his destruction did not. 

 

She remembered, in the end. 

He didn’t believe he’d survive even as she entered his temple, the beeping, chittering eyebot at her side, red eyes of her Old World combat armor glittering strange and deadly. He’d never seen her, only walked her legacy, breathed the stinging dust she left in her wake, and when she removed her helmet he was almost shocked. A mess of a face, rawboned and scarred, the ugly divot left by Benny’s bullet sitting above warm dark eyes. She smiled at him as he spoke, and Ulysses suddenly knew what it was for a rabbit to chew its own leg off in a trap.

After it was done, after she spoke soft and strong to him and left her eyebot in a shower of sparks and marked men’s corpses, they walked together, away from his home, away from the shuddering wrenching giants she’d caged again below the earth. She walked as all couriers did, back bowed under her burden, eyes scanning the horizon for trouble, and he found himself talking, more words than he knew he had, bubbling unbidden like the desert springs his brother had showed him to find when they were young.

The weight of what he had done would catch him sometimes, leave him reeling and breathless. She came religiously every month, loaded with supplies for him, and the improbability of her kindness seemed just as glitteringly strange as his own survival- equally unlikely, equally true. He’d touched her just once- traced his fingers over the bullet scar- the closest he could get to an apology, and she’d smiled up at him. He wondered if she knew.

She told him about Joshua Graham, alive though not quite reformed, and Ulysses remembered him as he’d once been, tall and proud, as terrible and beautiful as the clouds of fire that had enveloped the Divide. It cheered him to know that the memory of New Canaan would survive after all he’d done, hoped the Legate would carry it truthfully, feared he wouldn’t. Men like them, they either carried history or sagged under its weight, suffocated by the raw truth of it.

He never believed he’d survive, but somehow he did.


End file.
